When the Windows 8 Consumer Preview landed at the end of February, the Metro-style e-mail client seemed like one of the strongest tools among a sparse and limited set of applications.

Microsoft shipped a few apps to show off the transport-inspired Metro interface that will dominate the next generation of Windows PCs and tablets—but cautioned that none of them were really ready for daily use. The simplified interface of the Windows 8 e-mail client seemed promising, like the shell of an application that could become very good if given the proper care.

With the right improvements, it might eventually end up as a good option for tablet users, comparable to the mail client in Apple's iPad. But Windows 8 is for both tablets and desktops—and the latest version of the Metro mail client is not close to being ready for desktop power users. Whether used on a tablet or desktop, we think Metro Mail in its current form will have users pining for a real desktop application.

Unfortunately, Windows 8 Mail just didn't improve much between February when the Consumer Preview came out and in late May when the more advanced Windows 8 Release Preview shipped. We are less than one month from the final version of Windows 8 being released to manufacturing, with actual Windows 8 devices set to go on sale in late October. The e-mail client will continue to improve, but what's in the Release Preview isn't likely to differ dramatically from what ships with Windows 8's retail edition. So it's time to give the client a more critical look than we did in its first go-round.

Because they are frequently bought by consumers but used for work, tablets are expected to provide a built-in e-mail client for accessing both business and personal messages. Microsoft is obliging by putting Exchange support in the Mail client for Windows 8, but has put itself in a bit of a difficult position. Windows 8, Microsoft says, will provide all of a consumer's or professional's tablet and PC needs, in both touchscreen and keyboard-and-mouse modes. But if the Mail client Microsoft provides free to tablet users works just as well in PC scenarios, it's one less reason to buy the pricey Microsoft Office and its included Outlook mail client.

Microsoft's competition is Apple... and also Microsoft

For the basics of reading and replying to e-mail, displaying folders, moving messages between folders, sending and receiving attachments, and such, Metro Mail works well enough. The interface is definitely optimized for touchscreens, much like the mail clients on the iPad and Android tablets. For mouse-and-keyboard users, the Metro Mail client exceeds the equivalent program for Windows 7 in some respects, but lags behind in overall functionality. Neither one ends up being an ideal option for desktop users.

Enlarge/ Windows 8 Mail provides a three-pane view. The left-most pane can show either your accounts or the folders in one account.

Windows 7 doesn’t come with a mail client pre-installed as Windows 8 does. Users who want a free e-mail application for connecting to webmail accounts can download the desktop program Windows Live Mail.

Live Mail offers an interface that's similar to Outlook, but has its problems, such as only supporting IMAP and POP servers. Windows 8 Mail improves on this by adding support for Exchange, but takes a step back by dropping IMAP and POP (which rules out connections to Yahoo webmail), at least in the pre-release version. (IMAP support is promised for a later, unspecified date.)

The Windows 8 Mail client also drops the calendar integration found in Windows Live Mail, another decrease in functionality. The overall experience is harmed as the client just seems to be missing random features, like the ability to flag a message for followup. An option to mark messages as junk or spam also seems to be missing (although you can manually move a message to the junk folder).

On the message flagging issue, a Microsoft representative pointed out to us that you could set up a folder to file important e-mails away, but said flagging isn't possible in the Release Preview. Microsoft couldn't say if it will be addressed by the time Windows 8 is released to manufacturing.

A Metro-esque version of Outlook is known to be in the works, but while businesses typically buy Office for their employees, home users are a lot less likely to make the purchase on their own.

As Windows 8 tablets will inevitably be compared to the iPad, it would help if Microsoft could exceed the iPad's mail app in functionality. That hasn't happened yet. While the iPad mail client doesn't offer major integrations with the calendar, the iPad pushes meeting requests and alerts to the user no matter which app they are in, and the user can respond without leaving the current app, making the lack of integration much less problematic.

(Clarification: The above screenshot comes from a jailbroken iPad running Mail Enhancer Pro from Cydia. But even with a non-jailbroken iPad, you can flag a message by clicking "Mark" and then "Flag," and the flag will be visible in your iPad inbox and propagate to other clients, like Outlook. The forthcoming iOS 6 is adding a viewing option letting you see all your flagged messages at once.)

It would probably be easier to list the e-mail clients that don't support flagging messages for followup than the ones that do. But for the purposes of this article, we must note that the Windows Phone e-mail client supports flagging. Windows Phone also supports IMAP, POP, and Exchange Active Sync. In these respects, Windows 8 Mail is feature-deficient compared not just to other desktop and tablet apps—it's behind Microsoft's own phone platform.

The Release Preview has also led to users reporting frustration over the Mail client being unable to connect to servers using self-signed certificates. This could be a problem for businesses that issue their own private certificates, or even individuals who host their own mail servers.

UPDATE: One reader asked if Windows 8 Mail lets you view your inbox while composing a new message or replying to a message. The answer seems to be no—composing a new e-mail brings up a window that covers the rest of the application.

This limitation is also true of the iPad e-mail client. Unlike the iPad, Windows 8 does let you view the windows of multiple apps side-by-side (so you could have Mail and a word processor or browser viewable at the same time, for instance). But compared to most desktop programs, the inability to compose e-mail while viewing your messages list is one less option for multi-tasking.

Windows Live Mail not quite dead yet

Given the limits in functionality in Metro Mail and the fact that the Windows Live brand is being de-emphasized by Microsoft, we wondered if the Live Mail client would remain an option for Windows 8 users. At first, Microsoft told us simply that Live Mail will continue to work on Windows 8, without specifying whether that only applies to users who upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 and transfer their applications.

More important is whether Microsoft will continue to make Windows Live Mail available as a free download, and will continue updating and supporting the application for users of Windows 8 and earlier versions of the OS. With a little more prodding, Microsoft gave us some good news: "Windows Live Mail will continue to be offered as a free download to customers of Windows 7 and Windows 8," the Microsoft representative said.

It should be noted that while Live Mail will work on Intel-based Windows 8 devices, it won't work on ARM tablets, which use a special version of Windows 8, called Windows RT, that excludes traditional desktop applications. Major updates to Windows Live Mail probably aren't to be expected. Microsoft certainly wants to sell customers on the Metro mail client—if something as important as e-mail can be converted to Metro on the desktop, it’ll be that much easier to convince users of Metro’s overall utility in traditional keyboard and mouse scenarios.

It wouldn't really be fair to compare Metro Mail to Microsoft Outlook, as that's a professional (and pricey) e-mail client that should (and does) outstrip the capabilities of any free program. But it makes sense to compare the Metro e-mail client to Microsoft's own Windows Live Mail.

In setting up e-mail accounts, Windows 8 Mail takes one step forward and another back compared to Windows Live Mail. For the types of accounts Windows 8 Mail supports (namely, Exchange, Gmail, and Hotmail), the auto-discovery works like a charm. Connecting to your employer's Exchange Server and accounts like Hotmail and Gmail can be done just by entering a username and password. Windows 8 Mail supports Hotmail and Gmail through Exchange Active Sync. But as we noted earlier, it doesn't yet support POP or IMAP, meaning you can't connect to Yahoo Mail or other services that don't support Exchange Active Sync.

Adding an account, Metro-style. Hotmail has been doubled for some reason.

On the plus side, the initial step of connecting to e-mail accounts is a lot easier in Windows 8 Mail than in Windows Live Mail (provided you don't need IMAP or POP). I found the auto-discovery process in setting up my Yahoo Mail account didn't work in Windows Live Mail, forcing me to manually enter the IMAP server settings. Since Live Mail doesn't offer Exchange support, I also had to manually configure the client to point to my employer's IMAP server.

I’ve been testing the Windows 8 Mail client in a virtual machine. I tried replicating Windows 8 touchscreen functionality by streaming the VM to an iPad with the Splashtop streamer. Unfortunately, that didn’t provide good enough functionality to make a verdict on the app’s touch capabilities.

Ars IT Editor Sean Gallagher is using Windows 8 on a Samsung tablet PC, however, and says the Mail client works well enough on a touchscreen.

"The wide-openness makes it much better for touch than on a keyboard. It's meant for quick access to mail, and touch replies, not to be a full client," Gallagher notes. "It works. But if you work in Desktop all the time (which most PC users will), it's kind of a drag to use."

137 Reader Comments

Windows 8 Mail leaves users pining for the desktop—or even their phonesMetro Mail has the skeleton of a good client, but hasn't been fleshed out.

Well ya know - seeing as how this is a PREVIEW pre-release version and the Final is not due out for a couple more months.....

WhyTF are you doing a review piece on software that is not even finalized yet ?

HERE IS A NOVEL CONCEPT: Wait for the product to be finalized. Then released - Then do a write up on the final product. IF it turns out to be as crappy as the Public Preview - then you have a sound argument. Until then - this is not any better than fluff and filler.

We have seen time and agin from Apple - Adobe - Microsoft and many other comp-anies that things change between the Preview editions and the final editions.

Must have been real slow at ARS this week as most of your content was filler - pulled from other sources or rehashed from previous topics almost to the point of simply making shit up.

How is it with multi-tasking? Can you look at your inbox and read other mail while you're composing a message (I'm guessing there's at least a painful way to save a draft and find it later, but is there a way that won't require 10 button clicks to move between a piece of mail and a draft)?

Good point. I don't think you can do that. You can save a draft, but composing a new email or replying to an email opens a new screen that covers everything else.

One thing you can do is have multiple windows, one for e-mail and one for another application. But unless it's a virtualization problem or I'm missing something, I don't see any way to type an email while seeing the rest of your message list.

Nope, I haven't been able to do it running on my desktop, either. The process for saving a draft is pretty painless (click on the "X" in the upper-right, select "save draft", and then your "Drafts" folder will immediately update and let you know you have one in there), but right-clicking (which is how you bring up the context menu) only shows options for formatting (bold/italics/etc.)There does not seem to be a way to side-by-side compose/read.

I feel like they developed the whole thing in HTML and JS and are having hard time implementing features like protocols.

Agreed. They have vast tracts of functional, useful code in Live Mail, code that handles things like IMAP and POP3 without a sweat, and they can't use it in Metro Mail because the Live Mail code is all C++ and Win32.

I've got the ugly feeling that Windows 8 users might end up with applications that have actually less features than the very same ones found in Windows Phone.

Yeah, Win8 desperatly needs to have a superset of functionality found in WP7.5 at the very least. They natively support SIM cards in the OS and have SMS support but the Mail and People apps - I dunno I don't want to slam the people writing these but I could write a Mail app with the same level of functionality in a week in C#, is it because these are HTML5-based apps or are the comms apps in Win8 being written by kids?

I sure am glad Jon decided to compare beta software with RTM software. Microsoft themselves has stated that they will be able to push app updates without updating the OS. I see no reason why they can't ship Windows 8 as-is, and push app updates for mail, people, and all of the other apps that are inferior to even their WP7 versions.

If there's one thing I've learned about this new microsoft, it's that they aren't going to let you down - not over something as trivial as an app update, and especially not for an app as important as mail.

Yes, that's the whole point, one of Metro's design principles is fierce reduction. Hilarity with the idea it's "trendy" though, Metro's based on Swiss Design which has been around since the fifties.

What's wrong with pulling clutter out of a UX? It's not like you don't know a box with writing in it means "button", right? I'm not apologising for crap design and quite a few Metro apps inbox in Win8 are v.v. poorly designed indeed but that's mostly down to just good ole crappy design which is even older

This...

And, I see this same paradigm in "mobile" websites. Even basic fuctionality is sometimes broken, forcing me to use the desktop version on my phone.

I would be interested to see the design brief on Mail ok to see the development team's way of thinking...

As much as I love windows 7, it appears windows 8 will be a bit of a disappointment. I will get the Microsoft tablet.

For being so heavily tested, it seems Microsoft did not accept much user feedback. I made a configuration kit to make it work more like win 7, for desktop users. I am just not feeling the Metro ui. It seems like it was rushed.

That secure boot seems not existent for me. i had no problem setting up a multi-boot system. I have 4 hard drives in my system. 6 operating systems. Each drive is a multi-partition set up. OS, and data.2 drives have Win 7. Each configured differently for different task. 1 has a Backtrack Linux, the other has Ubuntu 12.041 drive is set up with Hackintosh 10.7.41 drive has the Windows consumer preview(win 8). I am guessing this is what they mean by secure boot. I have not loaded Linux on the same drive with Win 8 on it.

I use OS X Mail every single day and I don't have any problem with it. What's the problem you have exactly? I use it for my POP email at work, with iCloud and my yahoo account and no problem at all. Very stable. You are saying something out of thin air here it seems....

And the matter of the fact for this windows 8 email app is that not only it's ugly, it's also useless. I can't believe that Microsoft wants to provide pc users such a miserable email app with such limited and idiotic interface. This is shame!!!!

Every time I've tried to use it as my regular mail client it would randomly lose the ability to download any messages. Once I would figure out that it wasn't working, I'd have to delete the account and then start over in order to get it to sync. Happened multiple times. Now I use Outlook and Sparrow.

I do know many people really like the Apple Mail client, the problems might have just been me. It has been probably almost a year since I've used it on a regular basis.

Mail is terrible, yes, but so is instant messaging, picture viewing, and the movie player. Not to mention things you can't even do yet in Metro, like edit movies or retouch photos. And launching a Metro app to just look at a jpeg is painfully slow compared to, say, launching IrfanView, Picasa Viewer, or even the Windows 7 image previewer.

Metro might be a great way to work on a tablet some day, but there are ZERO Metro apps so far that I can use regularly without missing a feature from a desktop equivalent.

If Windows 8 is considered a failure, it will be in large part because of Microsoft's decision to ship with default apps that are functionally equivalent to the Windows 95 era.

I went into the Windows 8 preview expecting to love it. Turns out it's really Windows 7 with a very inconvenient overlay. Desktop Metro is just a poor fit for keyboard and mouse at this point, but you have to duck into it frequently to do things like search your files.

Every time I invoked Metro, I wanted out of it as quickly as possible.

I went into the Windows 8 preview expecting to love it. Turns out it's really Windows 7 with a very inconvenient overlay. Desktop Metro is just a poor fit for keyboard and mouse at this point, but you have to duck into it frequently to do things like search your files.

Every time I invoked Metro, I wanted out of it as quickly as possible.

No you don't. You open an explorer window on the desktop and search your files.

I feel like they developed the whole thing in HTML and JS and are having hard time implementing features like protocols.

And you know this because????? Oh, you don't. You are speculating.

He's right though, I had a look in C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\microsoft.windowscommu..\modernmail

The whole thing is HTML and JS which was just an incredibly fucking stupid idea for a platform specific mail client. Hard to write in, launches as a "thing on a thing" , clunky to maintain, zero benefits for developer or customer.

I get that MS want to eat their own dogfood but jeez guys a C# mail client would be five times easier to maintain and launch way way quicker, time to end the crazy.

If there's one thing I've learned about this new microsoft, it's that they aren't going to let you down - not over something as trivial as an app update, and especially not for an app as important as mail.

C++ and C# are available as a standard metro development language, so they could use that. But apparently they aren't for this app which is silly.

Windows 8 is still in beta why are we reading reviews of alpha/beta software developed for a beta OS?

And it's my impression that they ARE focusing on the OS and not with apps. Everything from my 4 months of using the beta OS gives me the impression that the OS is coming along nicely. The apps are fairly lackluster, but the OS is what matters.

Speaking of basic features, can anyone using Metro Mail tell me if it supports standard encryption using S/MIME? I figure someone would have made a cert and given it a whirl, but after Googling for a while I'm having trouble finding anything either way. I may just be using the wrong keywords though.

If I put aside any concerns about whether the final app will be shipped in a more advanced state, I'm still more than surprised to discover that most of those Metro apps highlighted in recent Building Windows 8 blog posts seem to have been made from scratch without even looking at what the Windows Phone ones are currently offering. I've got the ugly feeling that Windows 8 users might end up with applications that have actually less features than the very same ones found in Windows Phone. That's an OS whose latest version will be one year old by the time most of us will be able to use Windows 8.

This really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone remotely familiar with Microsoft. It almost seems like their teams are encouraged to NOT collaborate on UI and such. Office is so completely different from the normal conventions of Windows (and has been for a long time)... Remember how MMC was supposed to give you single-pane management of all of your server-level apps? Look at how that worked out. (You can't put Exchange and SQL management into MMC at all.)

Speaking of basic features, can anyone using Metro Mail tell me if it supports standard encryption using S/MIME? I figure someone would have made a cert and given it a whirl, but after Googling for a while I'm having trouble finding anything either way. I may just be using the wrong keywords though.

Good question. We think the answer is no, as there doesn't appear to be anyplace to configure that. I'm not 100% sure, though.

Microsoft has disappointed me big time this round. The only good this to come out of this maybe, is they made their own tablet. But I wonder how well it will actually perform if the overlay it what is trashing the os. It is much lighter, so I am sure that has some improvement on performance, but now it is like 10 clicks to do what 2 or 3 would do normally. seems backwards to me. It should take less clicks.

iconmaster wrote:

I went into the Windows 8 preview expecting to love it. Turns out it's really Windows 7 with a very inconvenient overlay. Desktop Metro is just a poor fit for keyboard and mouse at this point, but you have to duck into it frequently to do things like search your files.

Every time I invoked Metro, I wanted out of it as quickly as possible.

I found most of these and other issues as well in my 3 trials of Win 8 beta. It is absolutely clear to me, Metro was designed for tablets using thinking available at the time, but has not been adapted to newer ideas released throughout it;s development, putting it at best already behind on launch, and that's just on tablets.

On Win 8, metro is aking to at best a VM running on top of a real OS. Apps don;t communicate across the two separeate systems, use differing rules, even the idea of a clipboard doesn;t translate to metro. yet, it rears it;s ugly head, and the onyl way to have live tiles tied to apps is for them to be nmetro apps, meaning all those fancy real-time updates go entirely unseen if you're in ANY app at all, and when you do launch the overglorified start menu page, and click on an updated status, you;re presented with Metro Mail, and can;t link to Outlook or other mauil apps directly (Outlook 13 will supprot tiles, but it will also launch the metro-only mode, and has to be relaunched as a seperate process in desktop for power users). That means even if you buy outlook, it will be a multi-step process to respond to a new email based on a screen notification, and unless you have more than 1 monitor, you'll lose the vew of your current work.

Win 8 is NOT, in even a tiny way, an OS power users will adapt to. Anyone who works concurrently in more than one app either requires more than 1 screen, or to stay on Windows 7. Metro was not thought out to be a desktop power user OS, it was designed for tablets. MS's dev team failed to integrate the two and make metro behave differently on full OS vs tablet, something that shoudl have been easy to do (though it may have taken another year). I would have been perfectly happy if metro launched on ARM tabelts now and a truly integrated experience was present on Win 8 next year, but alas, MS is in too much of a rush to get an N+2 release out to kick XP off the supprot roadmap, so we await windows 9 and a viable alternative while more and more people choose OS X daily.

I went into the Windows 8 preview expecting to love it. Turns out it's really Windows 7 with a very inconvenient overlay. Desktop Metro is just a poor fit for keyboard and mouse at this point, but you have to duck into it frequently to do things like search your files.

Every time I invoked Metro, I wanted out of it as quickly as possible.

NONE of these Windows 8 apps are finished yet! AND even after RTM, they won't be finished: Microsoft will continue to update them continuously over the next few months/years

Not having support for the two universal email retrieval standards POP and IMAP, it's hard to say that really even a Mail app. That's like having a browser that doesn't support javascript, just ActiveX; and it's the default program your flagship OS is shipped with. What possible good reason is there for not having these features so close to launch?

Speaking of basic features, can anyone using Metro Mail tell me if it supports standard encryption using S/MIME? I figure someone would have made a cert and given it a whirl, but after Googling for a while I'm having trouble finding anything either way. I may just be using the wrong keywords though.

Good question. We think the answer is no, as there doesn't appear to be anyplace to configure that. I'm not 100% sure, though.

Thanks for the reply. It's probably worth checking if it's tied to something else though. For example, does Windows 8 have a centralized certificate management system? Mac OS Mail has supported S/MIME for a long, long time (I don't want to say "always" since I didn't use the feature from the start, but it's been many years), but it's not actually anywhere in Mail per se. OS X uses a system wide per-user central security framework in the form of the Keychain, and that's where certificates and keys go. As soon as a cert/key are added for any given address that is an account in Mail, it automatically adds signing and encryption buttons (and it automatically stores all received certs in the keychain), but there's zero sign of the feature in Mail otherwise. From many points of view that makes total sense, and the feature itself is dead easy to work with (a good deal better then the situation under iOS, although even there the basics of S/MIME work perfectly since iOS 5), but it's also easy to miss. It's not anywhere in Mail's Help, for example, it's necessary to go to Apple's online kbase.

Doesn't matter, betas and public previews are for feedback and discussion, that's the point. And it's really, REALLY getting down the wire, this is long past the point when central basic features should be getting added. Core protocol support is about the first thing to do in an email client, not the last. It's like building a product for using the Internet and getting the entire web engine up but "Oh we'll worry about that HTTP thing later."

Quote:

AND even after RTM, they won't be finished: Microsoft will continue to update them continuously over the next few months/years

Um, yeah, all supported software continues to get updates everywhere. Duh. But people don't solely buy promises for the feature, a significant part of a product is, you know, the actual product as sold. Future promises are nice and do matter, but a product still has to justify itself to some extent Day 1 and this is really old, really basic stuff.

Article based on a release preview "app preview" of the mail client, with speculation that it won't change in RTM. Why don't you do some actual reporting and find out instead of just making assumptions and panning it.

In case you didn't notice, Windows 8 is supposed to go RTM sometime next month, which means they have only a few weeks to fix the mail client. Had you taken time to correctly read the article, you'd have seen this :

Jon Brodkin wrote:

We are less than one month from the final version of Windows 8 being released to manufacturing, with actual Windows 8 devices set to go on sale in late October. The e-mail client will continue to improve, but what's in the Release Preview isn't likely to differ dramatically from what ships with Windows 8's retail edition.

While the apps are bundled with the OS, they are not a part of it and can be updated separately.

NONE of these Windows 8 apps are finished yet! AND even after RTM, they won't be finished: Microsoft will continue to update them continuously over the next few months/years

Not having support for the two universal email retrieval standards POP and IMAP, it's hard to say that really even a Mail app. That's like having a browser that doesn't support javascript, just ActiveX; and it's the default program your flagship OS is shipped with. What possible good reason is there for not having these features so close to launch?

They've already said IMAP is coming. POP needs to die. There's no reason in 2012 you should be downloading actual copies of your email from the server. IMAP is superior in every way.